Can the right combination of technology and economic incentives get utility customers to turn down megawatts of power use fast enough to balance wind power’s ups and downs? Honeywell and Hawaiian Electric Co. (HECO) are going to try it out on the island of Oahu, using Honeywell’s automated demand response technology.

Under the two-year pilot announced Thursday, HECO plans to offer customers lucrative incentives to turn over their power loads -- factory motors and process lines, lights, air conditioners and the like -- to allow them to be turned down within 10 minutes' notice. Honeywell will connect the utility to customers with its Akuacom demand response servers, which use a standard called OpenADR.

It also will install its Tridium smart grid controllers at buildings to translate power-down signals into commands within the buildings. All told, the project is targeting 7 megawatts of power-down capacity, Jeremy Eaton, Honeywell’s vice president of smart grid solutions, said in an interview.

All of that integration work lies in the future, Eaton said. Right now, Honeywell is working with HECO to identify customers and start putting its technology in place. The utility is offering a $5 per kilowatt payment just for signing up, much like the so-called capacity payments paid to traditional demand response participants today, as well as 50 cents per kilowatt-hour for the up to 80 hours per year they may actually be powered down.

Wind power’s fluctuations are easier to balance out on the mainland, where utilities can tap regional power reserves like natural gas-fired peaker plants to help manage the ups and downs. But Oahu gets the lion’s share of its power from burning imported diesel fuel, which makes balancing power expensive and hard to come by -- thus justifying the high prices HECO is willing to pay participants in the new program.